SOARES: On cheapskates and swindlers

The last few drops of coffee dribbled into the plastic cup but there was a long pause after the last drip, just in case there was a latent dribble left in the dented Thermos. Albert was a frugal sort, but he took that peculiarity one step further by straining his coffee through a piece of cheese cloth.

By Charley Soares

The Herald News, Fall River, MA

By Charley Soares

Posted Mar. 17, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated Mar 17, 2013 at 5:03 PM

By Charley Soares

Posted Mar. 17, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated Mar 17, 2013 at 5:03 PM

» Social News

The last few drops of coffee dribbled into the plastic cup but there was a long pause after the last drip, just in case there was a latent dribble left in the dented Thermos. Albert was a frugal sort, but he took that peculiarity one step further by straining his coffee through a piece of cheese cloth.

Perhaps you or your parents owned one of those plaid tin Thermos bottles that “really” kept hot liquids hot and cold liquids cold. My mom bought one in the early 1950s that I believe cost around $1.99 at the hardware store, but the refills cost about a dollar and they were oh-so-fragile. I know, because I broke a few of them. Although they were flimsy, they really did the job better than anything I have ever used made of stainless but, as noted, they were so fragile, they broke if you stared at them too hard. It was rumored that the caretaker and a few members of his inner circle were scheming to scare Albert into buying a new Thermos.

He had dropped his so many times all the glass insulation was broken, and it sounded like ground glass shaking around whenever he lifted it. The glass was between the usually plaid metal outside and the plastic liner. When it was dropped and the glass was broken, the beverage was protected by the inner liner.

The caretaker told Albert they knew of a man who drank from a broken Thermos, swallowed a mouthful of glass and ended up in the emergency room. Now, that warning might have been enough to scare most people, but not old Al. He was a rough-and-tumble character who would not spend a penny if he could help it. That was why he was straining his coffee through a cloth.

One morning, he went to the Bridge Diner to get his large black coffee before he walked the shoreline to the boat house. He poured a semi-hot cup of coffee into the attached cup and walked over to the boat-builders’ shed. That was when the crew stole his Thermos and poured the coffee into a pot, before unscrewing the unit and replacing the insulating liner with a new one.

After refilling the Thermos, they put it right where he left it. Well, they waited and waited but Albert never let on about the obvious exchange and it was driving them crazy, so after a week of the standoff, when he left his bottle unattended, they dropped it a few times and broke the liner. I never knew what the final outcome was because no one ever admitted to anything, so you can just imagine what kind of influence the hijinks of those old-timers had on an impressionable lad.

There were quite a few old-timers who were scarred by the Depression, and one of them was Gus. He had a leaky old tub of a work skiff that would usually fill up and sink up to the gunwales every few days, but rather than spending a few dollars to caulk it up, he would bail it daily to keep it afloat until the next day. Now, it wasn’t like he ever used the boat, but he was reluctant to give up the spot on the tender line he had waited so long to qualify for, so he put up with these tribulations until one day his lines got tangled and almost caused the entire fleet to break away in heavy winds and seas. This was unacceptable, so he got his tail chewed by fellow members, who decided to take matters into their own hands. Gus used an old split oar to paddle the club livery out to his boat, so one of the members took that oar and cut it into five-inch pieces, before depositing the remnants into a bucket in front of Gus’s locker.

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I bailed that old tub on numerous occasions when I was tending to the boats at the request of the caretaker, but after the oar incident, I was instructed to leave his boat alone. Sure enough, a combination of rain and unabated leaking sunk the boat up to the gunwales, which was the last straw for the other members with boats on the line. They hauled his boat way up onto the beach, behind two rotting scows, flipped it over out of sight and swore each other to secrecy. When Gus showed up and found his boat missing, he never said a word, and for weeks he believed his boat had filled with water and drifted away.

When Gus went home in the late afternoon, he never returned to the club until mid-morning of the next day, so one evening, a few days before the Fourth of July, they hauled his boat up to the high-tide mark, poured gas on it and set it afire. The old man went on to his just rewards never knowing what happened to his boat, and none the worse off, as far as I could tell from that turn of events. The caretaker informed me that the old boat had good bones, and a few years prior to the fire, he volunteered to repair the boat for about $5 in materials and free labor, but Gus was so cheap he would not agree to it.

Back then, a sturdy skiff like that would have brought at least $50, but like many of his Depression-era contemporaries, Gus was penny wise and pound foolish.

There are so many more pikers I could feature, but there was one particular man whose antics are still in vogue today. He was the type of individual who was out to beat everyone at every opportunity. When I was working at the drug store, the piker (for obvious reasons I can’t mention his name) would come in every evening and order a coffee soda. That drink was made with a combination of coffee syrup, a shot of milk and topped off with soda fizz. For some reason, that was a very popular drink at the time, and I made quite a few every evening. The piker would come in, order his drink, then move off into the store to join the customers awaiting the delivery of the Daily Record out of Boston.

On more occasions than I care to recall, he would return to the counter with less than half a glass left and complain that it was too fizzy, not fizzy enough or that I forgot to put something in according to the recipe. That would get him one and a half drinks a night, and sometimes more, according to the other employees who also worked the soda fountain. Everyone knew what he was up to, but no one called him on it because his wife filled all of her many prescriptions at that pharmacy.

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The swindler, who was reported to be quite well off in comparison to his neighbors, also had a nasty habit of agreeing to a price for a job, then re-negotiating it after the project was done using any number of false premises. A well-regarded carpenter replaced the stairs to his front porch, after which he claimed they were not installed properly, and rather than argue, the tradesman accepted the lesser amount. The piker’s reputation was known throughout the village, and it became more and more difficult for him to hire tradesmen.

The final straw was when he hired an unemployed dock worker named Larry to shovel out his walk and driveway after a big snowstorm. Larry had a big family to feed and took to his task with vigor. After he finished, he rang the doorbell to obtain his fee, which the piker claimed was too high for the time it took him to remove the snow. Larry was well aware of the man’s reputation and, grasping him by the collar, lifted him up and pinned him up against the building until he received his money.

With the agreed-upon sum in hand, Larry proceeded to shovel a ton of heavy wet snow up against the piker’s garage door, ensuring that he wouldn’t be going anywhere any time soon. The piker threatened to call the police, to which Larry responded that he would be happy to keep stacking snow up against the door until their arrival. No call was ever made to a police department that had become all too familiar with the piker’s shenanigans.

As Jesus once said, the poor will always be with us, and I can make a similar case for cheats and swindlers. This was particularly true for a boy like me, who learned about trust the hard way. If you make a promise, keep it; if you make a promise to a child, you damn well better keep it.